4 ms·

I just can't get my head around that the publishers have been looking at music industry going from napster to torrent to spotify. Now they are looking at libgen

I just can't get my head around that the publishers have been looking at music industry going from napster to torrent to spotify. Now they are looking at libgen and seem to be completely unable to connect the dots and come up with a coop that sells all their books with a monthly fee so that they could keep the profits instead of amazon or whatever startup that manages to circumvent all the legal hassles and make a spotify for books. How hard can it be for a couple of larger publishers to start a common book streaming service with a note that all other publisherss welcome, you become a member in the coop and get to say how the coop works, coop takes a fee from sales just to cover operating costs and rest goes to publisher/author?

GiorgioG 6y ago
Having worked for a very large publisher - they don’t get tech at all.
dlgeek 6y ago
Amazon did this - it's called Kindle Unlimited.
- fock 6y ago
  both of you miss the point. I want to have a diskful of books, I can pass on to my kin and also share with friends (which is like normal books worked for years...). I don't want to have a streamingservice which can censor and restrict my rights to read a book at will.
  - peternicky 6y ago
    100%...
  - hk__2 6y ago
    > both of you miss the point. They don’t "miss the point", they just disagree with you.
  - Nbox9 6y ago
    You’re missing the point. Some people still buy CDs and Records. Some people fill up disks with .flac or .acc files. The industry still serves those customers, but the real business is happening on the streaming services. What _you_ want and what the market demands are two different things.
amluto 6y ago
Why do the publishers need to start with a fancy business model? First they should have a basic website that sells .epub files. I would gladly pay a publisher the the amount that Amazon charges if they would sell me an unencumbered epub.
- eganist 6y ago
  Co-ops aren't so much a fancy business model as they are a basic one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative It's just that more often than not, participants in western economies don't start co-ops because the profit potential for the founders isn't remotely close to what it could be for starting a run of the mill corporation.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Presumably it's because the publishers are paranoid about piracy and/or people who want DRM-free books are a minority. I was actually surprised when I bought a book on an online bookstore yesterday and was given the option to download it as an epub in addition to reading it in the Play Books app. Apparently that's a flag that anyone can set, but most authors/publishers choose not to.
  - amluto 6y ago
    Perhaps, but Tor books are DRM-free in general. Nevertheless, it appears to be impossible to give Tor money and get an ebook in exchange.
arrosenberg 6y ago
Amazon gained monopoly power over book distribution before they knew what hit them. Now I'd imagine they are stuck.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  genuine question : isn't the continued existence of Barnes and Noble a counterexample to monopoly power?
  - lenkite 6y ago
    More like the dying existence of Barnes and Noble. They have shut down most of their stores and fired most of their employees. And they are losing online too. Can't compete with Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited. A monopoly in multiple-domains gives holistic, undeniable advantages in kicking any competitor to the curb. Amazon is the Godzilla smashing B&N worker-ant into paste.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    No. I'm not sure there is anything Barnes and Noble could practically change that would gain them a significant amount of market share from Amazon. The network effects of Kindle, Audible (the unlimited variants of both), and Prime delivery would make it impossible for B&N to really compete in the way a normal American would think about it. The term monopoly power is colloquial doesn't require a market to only contain a single company. It's enough for a single dominant player to have market-setting power in either a region, nationally, or globally.
    - slowmovintarget 6y ago
      On Amazon, I have almost no way to guarantee I'm actually going to get the edition (print, that is) I intended to purchase. Barnes & Noble lets me buy the particular edition. Amazon lumps in rip-off photocopy books with the actual print editions and calls them all "hardcover" or "paperback" with different prices. You get an ISBN for some edition of the book, but not necessarily the one you have selected when you add it to your cart. I've taken to buying more print books from B&N for this reason. (War and Peace, Shogun, Moby-Dick... it's hard to find proper hard cover editions of these books, especially if there's a particular translation you're looking for, like in the case with Tolstoy.) I have this silly hope that the market will begin to swing away from Amazon as consumers attempt to avoid the rampant counterfeiting, and the lack of specificity and control for what you're actually buying. Time will tell.
nerfhammer 6y ago
they know that most purchased books never actually get read so they're afraid of pricing models that are based on how much people actually read. they're used to being able to sell dead trees and not having to worry about that.
- angelbar 6y ago
  Antilibrary men... https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary
an_opabinia 6y ago
On the flip side, consumers value the physical book product very highly. Intangible stuff is always really hard to sell. Despite Spotify, most of the revenue in the music business still went to the Walkman, the iPod, the iPhone, and now $160 AirPods. Indeed I think AirPod sales are comparable to the entire music industry’s revenue.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And a lot of people assume that the physical book artifact is some big proportion of the actual cost. Among other reasons (including that it's easy to make copies and distribute them in torrents), this means that people think a digital product that costs almost as much as a physical one is ripping them off.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
Completely unable? Amazon runs Kindle Unlimited which is spotify but with text. And then there's Audible Plus which comes with some selection of books. And companies like O'Reilly have been running services like Safari since before Apple named their browser Safari. But piracy apologists continue to claim that the publishers aren't tech savvy enough or business savvy enough. The services are there. I can only presume that readers prefer to buy their books one at a time, often printed on paper. That's the only reason the services haven't become household names like Spotify or Netflix.
- thekyle 6y ago
  I wonder if it's because reading books is more niche compared to listening to music or watching TV. So a higher percentage of book readers are enthusiasts who prefer to own rather than stream.
cstross 6y ago
They can't do that because publishing these days is, when you get down to it, all about supply chain contract management. And in particular, my book contracts stipulate in mind-numbing detail precisely how sales will be accounted for (what percentage of net receipts go to me, or to the publisher, depending on volume and/or discount rates). The contracts make hard-coded assumptions about how books are sold that can't readily be rewritten. Also, contracts for different books by the same author may have different T&Cs, never mind contracts issued in different years (occasionally publishers try to "fix" things by turning Legal loose on their inherited contract boilerplate, usually with questionable results because they invariably make a massive land-grab and then the bigger literary agents all lawyer up and arm-wrestle for a better deal for their clients). It's bad enough that at least one of the Big Five (to my definite knowledge, as I work with them) has fired up an internal start-up publisher, mostly using the same editorial team and production facilities, but where the distinguishing characteristic is that (a) they totally rewrote their book contracts to make it possible to do new and exciting stuff, and (b) target ebook sales as a primary channel. (Disclaimer: this is my primary publisher in the US market right now and I'm very happy with the way things are going.) But when you're dealing with multinational publishing corporations you've got to bear in mind they have tens of thousands of book contracts going back decades which can't easily be dragged around onto a new business model, and they suffer from activist shareholders and an ever-constant threat of hostile takeover (see the ongoing Simon and Schuster takeover by Penguin Random House).
asdff 6y ago
Why do that when libraries will out compete you on price? Print is getting more popular again too among younger generations. Certainly easier on the eyes than staring at yet another screen for hours more a day imo.
- thekyle 6y ago
  I think eInk solves the eyestrain problem for reading books just as well as paper.

GiorgioG 6y ago

Having worked for a very large publisher - they don’t get tech at all.

dlgeek 6y ago

Amazon did this - it's called Kindle Unlimited.

fock 6y ago
both of you miss the point. I want to have a diskful of books, I can pass on to my kin and also share with friends (which is like normal books worked for years...). I don't want to have a streamingservice which can censor and restrict my rights to read a book at will.
- peternicky 6y ago
  100%...
- hk__2 6y ago
  > both of you miss the point. They don’t "miss the point", they just disagree with you.
- Nbox9 6y ago
  You’re missing the point. Some people still buy CDs and Records. Some people fill up disks with .flac or .acc files. The industry still serves those customers, but the real business is happening on the streaming services. What _you_ want and what the market demands are two different things.

amluto 6y ago

Why do the publishers need to start with a fancy business model? First they should have a basic website that sells .epub files. I would gladly pay a publisher the the amount that Amazon charges if they would sell me an unencumbered epub.

eganist 6y ago
Co-ops aren't so much a fancy business model as they are a basic one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative It's just that more often than not, participants in western economies don't start co-ops because the profit potential for the founders isn't remotely close to what it could be for starting a run of the mill corporation.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Presumably it's because the publishers are paranoid about piracy and/or people who want DRM-free books are a minority. I was actually surprised when I bought a book on an online bookstore yesterday and was given the option to download it as an epub in addition to reading it in the Play Books app. Apparently that's a flag that anyone can set, but most authors/publishers choose not to.
- amluto 6y ago
  Perhaps, but Tor books are DRM-free in general. Nevertheless, it appears to be impossible to give Tor money and get an ebook in exchange.

arrosenberg 6y ago

Amazon gained monopoly power over book distribution before they knew what hit them. Now I'd imagine they are stuck.

jjtheblunt 6y ago
genuine question : isn't the continued existence of Barnes and Noble a counterexample to monopoly power?
- lenkite 6y ago
  More like the dying existence of Barnes and Noble. They have shut down most of their stores and fired most of their employees. And they are losing online too. Can't compete with Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited. A monopoly in multiple-domains gives holistic, undeniable advantages in kicking any competitor to the curb. Amazon is the Godzilla smashing B&N worker-ant into paste.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  No. I'm not sure there is anything Barnes and Noble could practically change that would gain them a significant amount of market share from Amazon. The network effects of Kindle, Audible (the unlimited variants of both), and Prime delivery would make it impossible for B&N to really compete in the way a normal American would think about it. The term monopoly power is colloquial doesn't require a market to only contain a single company. It's enough for a single dominant player to have market-setting power in either a region, nationally, or globally.
  - slowmovintarget 6y ago
    On Amazon, I have almost no way to guarantee I'm actually going to get the edition (print, that is) I intended to purchase. Barnes & Noble lets me buy the particular edition. Amazon lumps in rip-off photocopy books with the actual print editions and calls them all "hardcover" or "paperback" with different prices. You get an ISBN for some edition of the book, but not necessarily the one you have selected when you add it to your cart. I've taken to buying more print books from B&N for this reason. (War and Peace, Shogun, Moby-Dick... it's hard to find proper hard cover editions of these books, especially if there's a particular translation you're looking for, like in the case with Tolstoy.) I have this silly hope that the market will begin to swing away from Amazon as consumers attempt to avoid the rampant counterfeiting, and the lack of specificity and control for what you're actually buying. Time will tell.

nerfhammer 6y ago

they know that most purchased books never actually get read so they're afraid of pricing models that are based on how much people actually read. they're used to being able to sell dead trees and not having to worry about that.

angelbar 6y ago
Antilibrary men... https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

an_opabinia 6y ago

On the flip side, consumers value the physical book product very highly. Intangible stuff is always really hard to sell. Despite Spotify, most of the revenue in the music business still went to the Walkman, the iPod, the iPhone, and now $160 AirPods. Indeed I think AirPod sales are comparable to the entire music industry’s revenue.

ghaff 6y ago
And a lot of people assume that the physical book artifact is some big proportion of the actual cost. Among other reasons (including that it's easy to make copies and distribute them in torrents), this means that people think a digital product that costs almost as much as a physical one is ripping them off.

xhkkffbf 6y ago

Completely unable? Amazon runs Kindle Unlimited which is spotify but with text. And then there's Audible Plus which comes with some selection of books. And companies like O'Reilly have been running services like Safari since before Apple named their browser Safari. But piracy apologists continue to claim that the publishers aren't tech savvy enough or business savvy enough. The services are there. I can only presume that readers prefer to buy their books one at a time, often printed on paper. That's the only reason the services haven't become household names like Spotify or Netflix.

thekyle 6y ago
I wonder if it's because reading books is more niche compared to listening to music or watching TV. So a higher percentage of book readers are enthusiasts who prefer to own rather than stream.

cstross 6y ago

They can't do that because publishing these days is, when you get down to it, all about supply chain contract management. And in particular, my book contracts stipulate in mind-numbing detail precisely how sales will be accounted for (what percentage of net receipts go to me, or to the publisher, depending on volume and/or discount rates). The contracts make hard-coded assumptions about how books are sold that can't readily be rewritten. Also, contracts for different books by the same author may have different T&Cs, never mind contracts issued in different years (occasionally publishers try to "fix" things by turning Legal loose on their inherited contract boilerplate, usually with questionable results because they invariably make a massive land-grab and then the bigger literary agents all lawyer up and arm-wrestle for a better deal for their clients). It's bad enough that at least one of the Big Five (to my definite knowledge, as I work with them) has fired up an internal start-up publisher, mostly using the same editorial team and production facilities, but where the distinguishing characteristic is that (a) they totally rewrote their book contracts to make it possible to do new and exciting stuff, and (b) target ebook sales as a primary channel. (Disclaimer: this is my primary publisher in the US market right now and I'm very happy with the way things are going.) But when you're dealing with multinational publishing corporations you've got to bear in mind they have tens of thousands of book contracts going back decades which can't easily be dragged around onto a new business model, and they suffer from activist shareholders and an ever-constant threat of hostile takeover (see the ongoing Simon and Schuster takeover by Penguin Random House).

asdff 6y ago

Why do that when libraries will out compete you on price? Print is getting more popular again too among younger generations. Certainly easier on the eyes than staring at yet another screen for hours more a day imo.

thekyle 6y ago
I think eInk solves the eyestrain problem for reading books just as well as paper.